I was watching a TV show and this term was used.
I am familiar with the definition, but I was wondering the origin of the phrase. It does not make sense to me if taken literally.
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I was watching a TV show and this term was used.
I am familiar with the definition, but I was wondering the origin of the phrase. It does not make sense to me if taken literally.
Best Answer
W.S. Farmer & J.L. Henley, Slang and Its Analogues, vol. 2 (1891), says that "dead to rights" means "certain; without doubt," and asserts that it is simply an amplification of the earlier term "to rights," meaning "completely to one's satisfaction." Dead appears in a similarly amplifying way in such current phrases as "dead broke," "dead certainty," "dead heat," and "dead ringer."
Christine Ammer, The American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms (1997) gives a sense of how much the meaning of the phrase has evolved:
Harold Wentworth & Stuart Flexner, Dictionary of American Slang, first edition (1960) gives both meanings:
But the Robert Chapman & Barbara Kipfer, Dictionary of American Slang, third edition (1995) agrees with Ammer's narrower definition:
UPDATE (9/17/2013): I did some checking in Google Books search results and found a source that probably explains Chapman & Kipfer's "by 1859" dating. George Matsell, Vocabulum; or, The Rogue's Lexicon (1859), contains this entry:
To like effect is a glossary entry in George Burnham, Memoirs of the United States Secret Service (1872):
So it appears that Farmer & Henley didn't fully grasp the sense of "dead to rights" as the phrase was used in the latter half of the nineteenth century, though the meaning that Slang and Its Analogues ascribes to the term certainly does appear in some contemporaneous writings. For example, from "Born and Raised in Mobile," in Sweet & Knox, Three Dozen Good Stories from Texas Siftings (1887):
FURTHER UPDATE (1/24/2017): The earliest match for "dead to rights" that an Elephind search of multiple old newspaper databases returns is from "Pickpockets at the Depot: Caught in the Act—One of the Gang in Prison," in the [Harrisburg] Pennsylvania Daily Telegraph (August 14, 1862):